Jaworski’s career is the stuff legends are made of. He went from being a prominent Texan trial lawyer to a race-horse breeder, the founder of Generon Consulting and an oil refining company, and the visionary behind such ambitious ventures as the Global Leadership Initiative and the American Leadership Forum. Jaworski’s life blends a passion for tackling complex, global-scale challenges with an insistence on achieving practical results that dramatically alter the status quo.
In this engaging conversation, he describes a process by which a small group of committed individuals can harness their collective intention and operate as a single intelligence. Whether applied to eradicating childhood malnutrition in India or generating alliances among competitive companies, this technique enables individuals to tap into deeper levels of knowing for the benefit of a larger whole. He also speaks about his collaborations with other organizational development visionaries such as Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer, and he casts a seasoned eye on the future of business and its unique capacity to be a catalyst for worldwide transformation.
Joseph Jaworski has devoted much of his life to exploring the deeper dimensions of transformational leadership. As chairman of Generon Consulting and cofounder of the Global Leadership Initiative, Jaworski collaborates with leaders who understand that their personal journey is inextricably linked to their organization’s future, and works with clients on large-scale organizational transformation.
Jaworski began his professional career as an attorney at Bracewell & Giuliani, a large Houston-based law firm. In 1975, he was elected as a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. In addition, he ran a successful horse-breeding operation and helped found several businesses, including a life insurance company and an oil refining company.
In 1980, Jaworski founded the American Leadership Forum, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to strengthening collaborative civic leadership in the United States. Ten years later, he joined the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of companies in London to head Shell's renowned team of scenario planners. Under his leadership, the Shell team made a fundamental shift in the way the company framed and used scenarios as a tool for strategy formation.
Jaworski returned to the U.S. as a senior fellow and member of the Board of Governors of the MIT Center for Organizational Learning, later cofounding the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL). He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Synchronicity, an explication of generative leadership based upon his lifelong work and experience. He is also coauthor of Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society, which chronicles the collaborative development of a new theory of learning and change.
